Installation

Installation

Server Requirements

The Lumen framework has a few system requirements. Of course, all of these requirements are satisfied by the Laravel Homestead virtual machine, so it's highly recommended that you use Homestead as your local Lumen development environment.

However, if you are not using Homestead, you will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:

  • PHP >= 7.0
  • OpenSSL PHP Extension
  • PDO PHP Extension
  • Mbstring PHP Extension

Installing Lumen

Lumen utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Lumen, make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.

Via Lumen Installer

First, download the Lumen installer using Composer:

composer global require "laravel/lumen-installer"

Make sure to place the ~/.composer/vendor/bin directory in your PATH so the lumen executable can be located by your system.

Once installed, the lumen new command will create a fresh Lumen installation in the directory you specify. For instance, lumen new blog will create a directory named blog containing a fresh Lumen installation with all of Lumen's dependencies already installed. This method of installation is much faster than installing via Composer:

lumen new blog

Via Composer Create-Project

You may also install Lumen by issuing the Composer create-project command in your terminal:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/lumen blog

Serving Your Application

To serve your project locally, you may use the Laravel Homestead virtual machine, Laravel Valet, or the built-in PHP development server:

php -S localhost:8000 -t public

Configuration

All of the configuration options for the Lumen framework are stored in the .env file. Once Lumen is installed, you should also configure your local environment.

Application Key

The next thing you should do after installing Lumen is set your application key to a random string. Typically, this string should be 32 characters long. The key can be set in the .env environment file. If you have not renamed the .env.example file to .env, you should do that now. If the application key is not set, your user encrypted data will not be secure!